AUGUST 10, 1998:
Ever since William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Hollywood
has been searching for costume
dramas to which they can add some jazzy MTV-style cuts and an
amped-up alt.rock soundtrack (at least in the trailer). Since
teenage girls became such a powerful demographic (Titanic
anyone?), no one in Hollywood has gone broke appealing to the
backpack-and-tanktop crowd. The latest teen dream effort to mix
brocade and burgeoning love is Ever After, a mod-minded
update of the
classic "Cinderella" story.

Drew Barrymore stars as Danielle, a plucky orphan with an evil
stepmother (Anjelica Huston) and a major hankering for a hunky
prince (played by hunky newcomer Dougray Scott). Writer/director
Andy Tennant (who made his inauspicious feature debut with the
Olsen twins opus It Takes Two) sticks to the finer points
of the "Cinderella" myth, but tries to inject a more
"realistic" tone. Things start out in the royal court
of France where Mssrs. Grimm and Grimm (of "The Brothers
Grimm" fame) are called before Her Royal Majesty. The elderly
Queen has just read the brothers' latest fairy tale and wants
to set the record straight. She pulls out an antique glass slipper
and proceeds to tell the tale of her great grandmother, the "real"
Cinderella.

Since this in the '90s, we're asked to swallow a 16th century
heroine who reads books, is incredibly intelligent, highly independent
and possesses (according to the press kit) "an intriguing
mix of tomboy athleticism and physical beauty." Our new cinematic
Cinderella is so damn progressive that she's even called upon
to rescue the prince on a number of occasions. Now don't get me
wrong, I've got nothing against strong role models for girls.
I'm all for powerful female heroines (as my abiding love for "Xena:
Warrior Princess" should attest). It's just that Tennant's
brilliant idea of a tough fairy tale heroine comes a few years
too late. I can't recall the last movie I saw in which the heroine
failed to punch out the villain. Disney has made a whole industry
of plucky, independent heroines for at least the last decade.
Tennant has obviously been taking a lot of mental notes from the
folks at Disney. Danielle's oft-professed love of books, for example,
seems like a blatant swipe from Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
A number of Tennant's ideas (like making Leonardo Da Vinci Danielle's
"fairy godmother") aren't nearly as clever as he thinks.
Danielle even shows up at the climactic costume ball dressed as
an angel--another element Tennant seems to have forgotten stealing
from another movie, this time Romeo + Juliet.

The biggest problem with accepting our revisionist Cinderella
is that Tennant has removed her from her fairy tale setting. In
a fairy tale, of course, you can get away with anything. By placing
"Cinderella" in actual 16th century France and portraying
her story as real, it becomes much harder to swallow her consistently
anachronistic attitude. All Danielle has to do is demand suffrage,
work in a munitions factory, burn her bra and declare her love
for the Spice Girls to wrap up the last several hundred years
of feminism in one medieval package. ... Although, why (aside
from plot device) a girl ballsy enough to bitch out the Prince
of France for his political beliefs would spend her life kowtowing
to a nasty stepmother isn't quite clear.

That said, the teenage girls to whom this film is undoubtedly
aimed will probably accept Danielle quite readily. There has been
a familiar trend lately in teen romance stories (fostered, in
no small part, by Leonardo DiCaprio). In the 1970s, there was
huge money in the blaxploitation genre. These campy, almost fantasy-style
action flicks featured the downtrodden blacks of the day rising
up and triumphing against "The Man" (in the form of
corrupt cops or politicians) who has kept them down. In the 1990s,
there seems to be limitless profit in the Teensploitation genre.
Now it's downtrodden kids fighting off the oppression of "The
Man" (in the form of emotionally frigid parents) who has
kept them from loving who they want. I doubt, in this day and
age, many kids have actually gotten flack from their blue-blooded
parents for wanting to marry someone from the wrong side of the
tracks. Kids of today have simply taken the "My rich, snobby
parents won't let me marry the poor but sincere boy" message
of Titanic and interpolated it into their own life (where
it comes out something like, "My uptight, middle-class parents
won't let me get my belly button pierced"). Unfortunately,
these new "fight the power" films lack the sense of
humor and camp that their '70s progenitors had. There's a certain
overearnestness to films like Titanic (or Ever After)
that makes them slightly less palatable for the adults in the
audience.

Once Ever After gives up its pretension of realism, however
(probably about the time that Richard O'Brien shows up as a nasty
French villain named Pierre Le Pieu), things get a little bit
fun. Danielle does get to perform one very amusing rescue of the
prince from some surly Gypsies, and there are several hokey, but
cheer-worthy moments (like Danielle delivering the inevitable
right cross to her evil stepsister). As the press kit suggests,
"This is not your grandmother's Cinderella." You got
that right.